CHILDREN OF THE DJINN
The Yaresan are a proud, fierce tribal culture, recognized by their distinctive red costumes. Somehow they have managed to remain even more elusive than the Yezidis, their religion being known only to a few scholars even today. Any member of their faith who was approached by early European travellers, and asked about their beliefs, would simply answer with the words ahl-i haqq, meaning, 'We are worshippers of the truth.' Although not wrong, such a response was a little misleading, since the word haqq, 'truth', was a pun on their real inner beliefs, revolving around the word haq (spelt with one q) – the name they give to the Universal Spirit, the creator of the universe.
Like the Yezidis, the Yaresan are organized into isolated communities, which currently make up around 10 to 15 per cent of the modern Kurdish population. They are to be found mostly in the region of Kermanshah in the Lower Zagros, although they have also survived in scattered pockets in the Elburz mountain range of Iran, in the highlands of Azerbaijan and in northern Iraq.1 The earliest Yaresan religious texts are written in a sacred language known as Gurâni, which takes its name from one of the oldest tribes of Kurdistan. Many surviving Gurans are Yaresan, although the religion itself encompasses other tribes as well. The origin of Yaresan beliefs is even more obscure than those of the Yezidi. Nobody knows for sure how old the faith might be, although it is known to have taken its final form during the late medieval period. Despite this, scholars consider that their beliefs, customs and rituals are among the oldest still surviving in Kurdistan, and are seen as dating back to the very earliest phases in the development of the Iranian religion.2
The truth worshippers possess a complex cosmogony that has distinct parallels with their Yezidi neighbours. They believe that the Universal Spirit, Haq, once resided in what they see as a 'preeternity', symbolized by a pearl and manifested through their supreme avatar, the Lord God Khâwandagâr. This manifestation began the first of Seven Epochs, after which the world was created. The Haq then formed a group of seven holy angels, known as the Haftan, who bear striking similarities to those revered by the Yezidi. In a subsequent epoch the creation of the physical world was followed by the genesis of humanity, helped, of course, by the angelic hierarchy. Subsequent epochs have seen the emergence of sequences of seven avatars, incarnate angels in bodily form, the last of whom have manifested for the seventh and final time in this present age.3 The Yaresan's chief avatar of the Fourth Epoch was a character named Sultan Sahâk, whose immense veneration goes far beyond preserving the memory of one mortal being.
In the Shadow of Sultan Sahâk
Sultan Sahâk is accredited with a life on earth sometime between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, and it is after him that the Yaresan say they gained their name – yâr-i sân, 'the people of the Sultan'.4 Yet it is also apparent that this great saint has been seen – as Kurdish scholar Mehrdad Izady rightly expresses it – as a kind of 'superhuman, a supreme avatar of the Universal Spirit, who lived many centuries, possessed mysterious powers, and lives on as a protective mountain spirit in caves on the high peaks'.5 Clearly, then, he was no ordinary figure of history. He seemed to be someone more like the fabled King Arthur of British tradition, whose memory embodies the lives of many kings arid warriors, and whose story has enveloped much earlier Indo-European myth and legend.
So who was this super-hero of the Yaresan, and how might he be linked with the traditions of the fallen race?
Contradictory as it may at first seem, Sultan Sahâk can be directly equated with a dark, mythical tyrant named Zahhak, the demon or serpent king who appears in Firdowsi's Persian epic, the Shahnameh of the eleventh century AD.6 This anti-hero is said to have ruled the world during an age of chaos and disorder after Jemshid (or Yima) had lost the royal farr, or Divine Glory, through greed, following a reign of three hundred years. According to Firdowsi, Zahhak had been a true hero of the Iranian mythical dynasty before he succumbed to the trickery of Angra Mainyu, with whom he entered into an evil pact. In exchange for ruling the world, the wicked spirit was allowed to enter into Zahhak. As this took place, black snakes grew from each of the king's shoulders, and thereafter these had to be satisfied each day with the brains of young men kidnapped from villages far and wide. Even though Zahhak tried to cut away the snakes from his shoulders, they simply grew back again and demanded more sacrifices.
Having reigned for a thousand years the demon king is eventually tricked and captured by Feridun. He is interred inside Mount Demavand, where he is chained and tortured, and left to die a slow painful death. It is said that he still remains there today, blood seeping from his heart. Feridun's victory over the wicked tyrant allows him to take up the vacant position of king of Iran and all the world, which he reigns in peace and prosperity for a full five hundred years.7
This is the traditional account of Zahhak's long reign as portrayed in Firdowsi's Shahnameh. The Zoroastrian literature gives a very similar account, yet cites Azhi Dahâka as the name of the king. Here he is said to have been among the greatest of the daevas.8 In addition to this, it is claimed that he contrived to pair a mortal woman with a male daeva and a mortal man with a female Peri, and in so doing created the Negro race, quite obviously a deliberate racial slur on black Africans.9
Such was Azhi Dahâka's legendary story. The reality is that this demon king owes at least part of his existence to an actual historical personage named Astyages (584–550 BC), the last Median ruler, who was overthrown by his grandson Cyrus the Great, the first king of the Persian Empire. Astyages, the name given to this monarch by the Greek historian Herodotus, is said to have borne the royal title of Rshti-vegâ Azhi Dahâka,10 and it was the degenerate memory of his alleged wickedness that supposedly created the demonic tyrant featured in both Persian and Avestan literature.
This explanation is, however, only partially correct, for Azhi Dahâka's character and symbolism undoubtedly derived from several quite diverse sources. For instance, the Median kings were known to their Iranian neighbours by the title Mâr, which in Persian signified a 'snake', giving rise to traditions among the Armenians of 'the dragon (vishap) dynasty of Media',11 or the 'descendants of the dragon', i.e. the mythical descendants of Azhi Dahâka himself.12 Strangely enough, the word Azhdahâ, an abbreviation of Azhi Dahâka, is now the only Persian word denoting a 'snake'.13 Indeed, it would appear that Azhi Dahâka came to symbolize not only the serpentine form of Angra Mainyu, but also his incarnation on earth.
In addition to this, the idea of snakes growing from the shoulders of Azhi Dahâka appears to have been a direct borrowing from the mythology of neighbouring Mesopotamia. Here a serpent god named Ningišzida, who bore the title 'Lord of the Good Tree', was depicted in art with snakes rising out of his shoulders in exactly the same manner as the demon tyrant had been portrayed in Armenian and Iranian mythology.14 Ningišzida's role varied – in some accounts he is a guardian of underworld demons, while in others he guards the gate of Anu (or An), the Sumerian concept of heaven.15 In all these capacities he was undoubtedly linked to the Hebraic concept of the Serpent of Eden – the good tree being either the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil or the Tree of Life. Confirmation of this connection is in the fact that the Armenian scholar Moses of Khorenats'i records that an ancient folk-song speaks of the descendants of Azhi Dahâka as being venerated in at least one 'temple of the dragons'.16 Also in Armenia are a number of prehistoric megaliths, or standing stones, that take the form of serpents which are known as vishaps, or dragons, showing the immense antiquity of this cult. More importantly, at least one Armenian scholar has associated this archaic worship of the vishap with the Sumero-Babylonian cult of the snake.17
The connection between Azhi Dahâka and the Median kings is also significant, for it was through their downfall that Zoroastrianism was able to climb so rapidly to the position of state religion in Persia. At the same time, many of Media's Magian priests had jumped ship, so to speak, and embraced this revitalized form of the Iranian religion, and it was probably at around this very period that Azhi Dahâka gained his exclusively demonic character among the Persian peoples. As a consequence, the final Median king somehow became the personification of the terrible Lie preached by the serpent-worshipping Magi priesthoods, as well as a national antihero in Persian myth and legend.
Descendants of the Dragon King
In complete contrast, however, was the way in which Azhi Dahâka had been viewed by many of the Kurdish tribes who were previously subject to the Median dynasty of kings. To them the demon king was the hero and Feridun the villain! So much had they revered the memory of Azhi Dahâka that they came to believe that their entire race was descended of him. The story-tellers even readapted his legendary history to suit their needs. They claimed that a plot had been hatched by two of the king's stewards to substitute one of the human brains fed each day to the king's twin snakes. Instead of two human brains, they would feed them one sheep's brain and just one human brain in the hope that it would fool the serpents. Their plan worked, enabling them to daily liberate one of the two young men imprisoned for this sacrificial purpose. Each freed prisoner was given goats and sheep and allowed to escape into the mountains, and this was the supposed origin of the Kurdish peoples.18
The exact interpretation of this quaint myth is open to speculation, although it implied that the Kurdish race owed its entire existence to the two smart-thinking stewards of Azhi Dahâka, and by virtue of this to the king himself Yet because this great tyrant was also seen as a daeva, or demon, he could never have been accepted as an anti-hero by the devout, angel-worshipping Yaresan. In their religion, the serpent is a symbol of lust and carnal delights. It is also a device of the Fallen Angel – Azazel or Shaitân. They therefore transformed Azhi Dahâka into an avatar named Sultan Sahâk.
The Yaresan today seem blind to Sultan Sahâk's true origins, and would vehemently deny any connection with his dark half, Azhi Dahâka. This strange dichotomy in Yaresan beliefs is not speculative, but is accepted by Kurdish scholars such as Izady.19 Yet the influence of Sultan Sahâk goes far beyond the Yaresan, and is apparently found in various guises throughout the Upper Zagros region. He is also known by the name Sultan Is'hâq, or Isaac, the divine priest who features in the story about the Yezidi kochek named Bêrû, who visits heaven in order to request rain on behalf of the Kurdish peoples.
So what was the true origin of Azhi Dahâka? Why was this dragon king accredited with being the progenitor of the Kurdish race? And why has his memory lingered so long? The answer appeared to lie in the fact that, before his fall, the tyrant was seen as one of the mythical kings of Iran. Since these monarchs would seem to have borne distinctive Watcher traits, could it be that Azhi Dahâka represented a faint echo of the presence "and blood lineage of the fallen race – remembered in Armenia as the vishaps or dragon descendants – who lived during some distant age of humanity? It is to be recalled that, according to Firdowsi, one of Azhi Dahâka's, or Zahhak's, descendants had been the beautiful Rudabeh – the ivory-skinned princess whose face was 'a very paradise', whose skin from head to toe was as 'white as ivory' and whose height out-topped her future husband Zal, himself a giant of a man, 'by a head'.20 All these features were clear Watcher traits, like those presented in Enochian and Dead Sea material.
Remember, too, that the Armenians actually claim descent from a race of giants under the leadership of Hayk, whose name is equated with the Armenian word for 'gigantic'. Bringing together these two quite separate traditions is the fact that in a sub-text entitled 'From the Fables of the Persians', included by Moses of Khorenats'i in his History of the Armenians, the author says that Azhi Dahâka '[lived] in the time of Nimrod'21 and that he was one of the chieftains who seized local territories after the giants, or Titans, had divided the races following the destruction, or fall, of the mythical Tower of Babel.22 Could this 'fall' simply preserve yet another distorted memory of the 'fall' of the Watchers, and their gradual dispersion on to the plains surrounding the highlands of Kurdistan?
The Utopian City of Tigranakert
Moses of Khorenats'i 's History tells of the deeds and virtues of a much celebrated Armenian king named Tigran the Great, who ruled between 95 and 55 BC. He recounts the monarch's many great achievements, before going on to record that Tigran's ancestors came originally from Kurdistan and that they also claimed descendency from the dragon king Azhi Dahâka. Apparently the family fled their homeland because of the tyrant's continued oppression and settled in Armenia, out of which the mighty Tigran had arisen.23
At first this information might not seem to be of any special interest to my research into the fallen race, for many Kurds believed in a descendancy from Azhi Dahâka. Then I discovered something about Tigran which seemed to strike a nerve and was not to be overlooked.
Tigran the Great was a great warrior king who gained the crown of Armenia after winning back large tracts of land previously overrun by the mighty Parthian rulers of neighbouring Persia. He had then gone on to conquer Phoenicia, Syria, Upper Mesopotamia (northern Iraq) and Kurdistan. In 88 BC, King Mithridates IV of Pontus, a small kingdom in north-eastern Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey), enlisted Tigran's support in defeating the Roman army in neighbouring Cappadocia and Phrygia – both also in Asia Minor. Five years later, in 83 BC, Tigran was invited to become sovereign of Syria, following the collapse of the Seleucid dynasty. He reigned here for a full eighteen years, during which time Tigran was seen as the most powerful pontentate in the whole of western Asia.24
At the height of his success, Tigran decided to build a royal capital as his new seat of power in an area now occupied by the modern-day city of Siirt, in the heartland of Kurdistan.25 Around this new city Tigran established a kingdom named Tigranuan, or Tigranavand. Not only did this appear to have been the very region ruled by his Kurdish ancestors before their departure for Armenia, but it also happened to be close to where Eden would seem to have been geographically placed.
Admittedly this principality had been strategically important in controlling and defending the Persian Royal Road that cut through the Kurdish highlands; however, as Kurdish scholar Mehrdad Izady admits, Tigran's decision to build his citadel outside of Armenia 'can be interpreted as a sign that he felt his Kurdish past more than has been thought'.26 Tigranakert, as this royal city was called, quickly grew to become a great centre of learning in the style of the Greeks, with scholars invited to come there from all over the old Hellenic world. The Greek biographer Plutarch (AD 50–120) described Tigranakert as 'a rich and beautiful city where every common man and every man of rank studied to adorn it'.27
Within its huge defensive walls, Tigran quickly established a cosmopolitan population that included Assyrians, Cappadocians, Medians and Greeks from Cilicia on the Mediterranean coast, many, according to Plutarch, transported there after Tigran's army had razed their own cities in battle.28 This great cultural mixture of peoples ensured that Tigranakert became the focus of different religious cults and philosophical ideals, something Tigran seems to have wanted to foster.
Unfortunately, however, Tigranakert was finally sacked and despoiled by the Roman general Lucullus in 69 BC, after which its multinational population and Greek scholars were returned to their own countries. Despite its downfall, the city remained a great wonder right down to Islamic times, when it is recorded that one Muslim general prayed that he might take it without bloodshed, upon which its eastern gates were said to have been flung open by invisible hands.29
What then was the significance of Tigran's great city?
The writings of Moses of Khorenats'i would appear to suggest that, not only had Tigran and his descendants believed themselves to be descendants of Azhi Dahâka, but that they had also worshipped him in the form of an anthropomorphic serpent, similar in aspect to the Sumerian snake god Ningišzida.30 If this was the case, then there seemed every reason to believe that the Armenian tyrant located Tigranakert in central Kurdistan because he wished to recreate Azhi Dahâka's own seat of power. Since the Kurds traced their ancestry back to this serpent king, it would imply that the place of genesis of the Kurdish race – in other words, Azhi Dahâka's kingdom – corresponded very well with the site of Eden, the place of genesis of the human race according to Hebrew tradition. If the descendants of the Watchers really had instigated the serpent dynasty of Iranian kings, then it seemed likely that Azhi Dahâka had come to symbolize the legacy of the Watchers in the minds of the Kurdish peoples. Had Tigran therefore tried to create some kind of utopian city in full awareness of the region's past associations with the Serpent of Eden, the Lord of the Good Tree?
Yaresan Creation Myths
The Yaresan creation myths are quite unique in that they give two sets of names for the first couple. Not only are they referred to as Adam and Eve, but they are also known as Masya and Masyanag, their counterparts in the ninth-century Bundahishn text.
One Yaresan account tells how Azazel secured the services of the Serpent and the Peacock before entering paradise to tempt Adam and Eve into sin. Once inside the terrestrial garden, Azazel transformed himself into a handsome angel and encouraged Eve and then Adam to partake, not of the forbidden fruit, but of the forbidden wheat – an apparent symbol of material wealth among the Yaresan. As a result of his intervention, the first couple were expelled from paradise along with Azazel, the Serpent and the Peacock.31 This myth clearly demonstrates how the Kurds linked the fall of humanity with both the Serpent and the Peacock Angel, who are both seen as animal forms of the Fallen Angel. Once again, these are the most important totemic symbols of the Watchers.
The Kurdish Jews – who inhabited the area around the city of Arbela in Iraqi Kurdistan from the first century BC onwards until their final migration to Israel in the 1950s – also possessed a variation of the creation myth involving Adam and Eve. In their story, the Serpent of Eden appears, like Azazel in the Yaresan account, as a 'young, good-looking man'.32 Curiously enough, in this account the Serpent tries to seduce Adam, and not Eve. In fact, it says that he often used to hang around the Garden before even the creation of Eve!33
Both these stories show the belief among the Kurdish peoples that the Serpent of Eden was looked upon as a handsome angel who used the power of seduction to lure humanity to fall through disobedience. They were even more like an allegorical representation of the fall of the Watchers than their Judaeo-Christian counterpart. Why, then, had the Kurds placed a slightly different slant on the story of the Fall of Man? Did they have reason to update the story-line based on indigenous traditions concerning the fall of the angels?
Birds of the Angels
The Yaresan believe intensely in angels, many of whom appear to have distinct human qualities. One angel, named Mohammad Beg, claimed that in a previous incarnation he had been the fabulous bird Anqa, as well as the ancestor of Masya and Masyanag, the first human beings.34 The Anqa was an Arab form of the Simurgh, and since this bird's mythical homeland in the Airyana Vaejah (the Eranvej in the Bundahishn) was most probably Kurdistan, this revelation was extremely important. It implied that the human race had been born of an angel equated with a fabulous bird somewhere in the highlands of Kurdistan.
I had also been intrigued to discover that, in Yaresan tradition, Sultan Sahâk is accredited with a miraculous birth connected with a great bird. It is said that a divine being known as the Royal White Falcon had alighted on a stick perch. On its departure the Virgin Lady Dayerak unwound her skirt, 'on which the Falcon [had] settled'. Afterwards, she refolded her skirt, before unwinding it again to find a child there.35 This is all the legend says, although the clear connotation is that some kind of sexual union took place in which the virgin was inseminated by the seed of the Royal White Falcon, who signifies the carrier of divinity. Its role is identical to that of the Varaghna – the bird that transmits the royal farr from one king to the next in Avestan tradition.36 The perch itself is very likely a variation of the divine tree on which the Simurgh rests in Iranian myth.
Sultan Sahâk's strange birth attempts to demonstrate that the avatar was born of a divine parentage and that he was inspired by the Glory of God, bestowed on him by the seed of the Royal White Falcon.37 Once again this brought home the overwhelming link between serpents, predatory birds, divine wisdom and kingly glory among the indigenous tribes of Kurdistan. Why had these particular symbols gained such a prominent place among the angel-worshipping tribes? Had they inherited them from tribal ancestors who had preserved the memory of the Watchers' presence in this region? Certain very strange legends found among the native Yaresan and Jewish communities of Kurdistan, concerning the race of beings known as the djinn, would seem to suggest the answer might well be yes.
Born of the Djinn
The djinn, so the thirteenth-century Yaresan work entitled 'Ajayeb ol-makhluqat tells us, are 'a kind of animal' that have the ability to change their shape and appearance. They can appear as snakes. They can appear as scorpions, and they can even appear as human beings. In Muslim theology, the djinn were said to have been created two thousand years before Adam. They ranked alongside the angels and the chief among them was Eblis. For refusing to bow down before Adam, the djinn, along with Eblis, were cast out of heaven forever to roam the earth as demons.
In Yaresan lore, the story of the fall of the djinn runs a little differently. They say that once this ancient race had lived on earth without any kings or prophets among them. Then they began to revolt against the human prophets, and the world quickly degenerated into lawlessness. On seeing what was happening on earth, God sent an army of angels to deal with the rebellious djinn. The warriors of heaven prevented the evil ones from penetrating too deeply into the land by pushing them towards the sea.38 The angels finally took many djinn captive – among them the young Azazel, who was subsequently brought up in heaven.
This connection between the warring djinn and Kurdish folklore does not end here, for I found that among the legends of the Kurdish Jews there existed a most revealing tale. It featured that celebrated Israelite king Solomon, said to have been the wisest man in the world. The story tells how one day the monarch had ordered five hundred djinn to find him five hundred of the most beautiful virgins in the world. They were not to return until every last one was in their possession. The djinn had set about their immense task, going to Europe to seek out these maidens. Finally, after gathering together the correct number of virgins, the djinn were about to return to Jerusalem when they learnt that Solomon had passed away. In a dilemma, the djinn had to decide on what to do. Should they return the girls to their rightful homes in Europe, or should they keep them with them? Because the young virgins had 'found favor in the eyes of the jinn, the jinn took them unto themselves as their wives. And they begot many beautiful children, and those children bore more children . . . And that is the way the nation of the Kurds came into being.'39
In another rendition of the same story, a hundred genies are dispatched by Solomon to search out a hundred of the world's most beautiful maidens for his personal harem. Having achieved this quota, Solomon then dies and the hundred genies decide to settle down with the maidens amid the inaccessible mountains of Kurdistan. The offspring of these marriages result in the foundation of the Kurdish race, 'who in their elusiveness resemble their genie forefathers and in their handsomeness their foremothers'.40 'It is because of this story that the title "children of the djinn (i.e. genies)" is occasionally applied to the Kurds by their ethnic neighbours.'41
Why should the Jews of Kurdistan have possessed such stories about their gentile neighbours? Why should they see them as descendants of the djinn, who were never considered to have possessed corporeal bodies? And why should they have suggested that the Kurds bore physical resemblances to these djinn? They believed the djinn had settled in this mountainous region, and so they must have felt that the ancestors of the Kurds migrated to the region at some early stage in the history of the world.
For some reason, the Kurdish Jews assumed the djinn to have come from Jerusalem and the virgins, or maidens, from Europe. Why was this? And what constituted these alleged physiological similarities with the race of djinn? Did this suggest that the 'children of the djinn' bore both Watcher traits and white 'European' features? Certainly, there are two distinct races in Kurdistan – one olive skinned and of medium height and build with dark eyes, and the other much taller, with fair skin and, very often, blue eyes. E. S. Drower noticed this on her visit to the Yezidi village of Baashika in the Iraqi Kurdish foothills during 1940. She reported that 'many we saw in the village' were 'tall, well-built' men with 'fairish' faces of 'an almost Scandinavian type', adding that: 'Amongst the children of the village some were as flaxen-fair and blue-eyed as Saxons.'42 The ethnological origin of these individuals with clear white Caucasian features is not known, although it is easy to see how they could have been accused by the Kurdish Jews of having European ancestry.
I was beginning seriously to believe that the Kurds really were different in some way, and that their origins held important clues regarding the presence and ultimate fate of the Watchers. Furthermore, this was not the only evidence that Kurds were often born with physiological features resembling those of the fallen race.
Fear of Changelings
One terrible fear among the Yezidi is that, during the first seven days after birth, an infant can be invisibly substituted for a demon child belonging to a race of 'evil fairy' known as Rashé Shebbé, or Shevvé.43 For this very reason, the mother has to remain in bed during this initial period of vulnerability. The idea of 'fairy' children being exchanged for mortal babies is well known in European folklore, where the substitute infant is referred to as a changeling. The reality of such strange fears lies quite obviously in the fact that certain babies have been born with physiological features that are identified as traits of the 'demon' or 'fairy' race, and are therefore assumed to have been exchanged at birth. In the Near East, however, these legends refer not to small impish individuals, as in the European concept of 'fairies', but to the djinn and Peri – the progeny of Eblis, who before his fall was the angel Azazel. This therefore implied that the 'changeling' children of Yezidi tradition seemingly bore Watcher traits, bringing the debate back to the strange births of infants such as Noah, Rustam and Zal.
With this knowledge it becomes clear that the Yezidi women feared that their own children would develop features akin to those of the djinn, or the fallen race, and that in an attempt to prevent such ill-fated births precautionary measures would be taken.
Why should this fear of changelings exist so strongly among the Yezidi? The answer can only be that such 'demon' babies were once commonplace among Kurdish families, hinting at the rather disconcerting possibility that they could have been genetic throwbacks to a time when two quite separate racial types intermarried to produce offspring bearing the features of either parent, perhaps explaining why the offspring of the djinn and the maidens 'in their elusiveness resemble their genie forefathers and in their handsomeness their foremothers'. In time the chances of such inherited genes producing extreme traits obviously diminished, but every so often a giant child bearing the features of a 'demon' would be born into a community. As a consequence, it would be identified as a changeling that had been exchanged at birth by evil spirits.
These then were the 'children of the djinn'.
This knowledge of the Kurdish changelings could well represent further evidence in support of the idea that forbidden trafficking had taken place between the proposed Watcher culture and the earliest indigenous peoples of Kurdistan. But could such evidence be trusted? How old were these superstitious practices? So much of the Kurdish folklore, myths and legends seemed highly distorted, naïve and somewhat confused, making these accounts very difficult to decipher with any degree of certainty. Despite such shortcomings, hidden among them were several recurring symbols that seemed to crop up again and again – angels, demons, djinn, immortality, serpents, anthropomorphic birds, sovereignty, kingship and great cycles of time.
Missing, however, from the Yezidi and Yaresan literature was any real tradition that placed the biblical Eden in the highlands of Kurdistan.
Perhaps the Yezidi and the Yaresan were too close to the source of this mystery to have realized the immense importance once placed on this region by foreign religions. Only the Nestorian Church of Assyria (Upper Iraq) and the Church of Armenia embraced and promoted the idea that the Garden of Eden lay at the headwaters of the four rivers of paradise.44
Perhaps this was the point to begin looking much further back in time. The native religions of Kurdistan would seem to have preserved fragmented accounts of the Watchers' assumed presence in these parts; however, the most ancient cultures of Mesopotamia would appear to have recorded not only the existence of the fallen race, but also the precise history of their highland settlement among the mountains of Kurdistan.